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3/18/12

When nothing else seems that important (my thoughts on Trayvon Martin)

Last week I didn’t blog much. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say. I had plenty thoughts on why I think Dwight Howard’s a coward, and why I empathize with Bud Adams’ quest for Peyton Manning, and I can’t wait to get something up about how the Dolphins Matt Moore isn’t chopped liver!

But as much as I love sports, hearing about the cold blooded murder of Trayvon Martin made every single thing in the world seem less important to me. If you’re not up to date on the case, Trayvon was from Miami and had just turned 17. He traveled to Sanford, FL to stay with his dad and his dad’s fiancee. He went to the store to get some skittles and a can of tea. On his way back, he was stalked and murdered by George Zimmerman who claimed Trayvon looked suspicious, followed him against the advisement of 911 operators, and subsequently shot him dead about 70 yards from the doorstep of the house at which he was staying.

The police did not detain Zimmerman preferring to believe his statement that he shot the child in self defense and to poo poo witness reports to the contrary. Now we wait for the State’s attorney’s office and the US attorney’s office to hopefully lend some justice to the death of a little boy who should still be alive and studying to be a pilot.

The mere thought that a person could be followed at night by a 200lb+ male with a gun and be murdered by that person and no one so much as collects the killer’s clothing or spends more than 10 minutes finding out the details has kept me up nights and made me cry more in the past couple weeks than I have in the past few years. It’s hard to write about anything, even to celebrate the new deals of guys who have worked their asses off to get them, when life feels so much less valuable than it did before I found out this child was killed on the street.